“Why now? There’s got to be a reason.”

“I don’t know,” I said, losing patience. “How would I know? Maybe the police will come up with something. Having one of their own shot is a powerful incentive to find the bad guy. God knows they asked me to tell them every single thing I’ve done in the past few days, over and over. I’ll tell you something else I have to do-I have to go see the detective who got shot.”

Tolliver nodded. He turned his face away from me, to look out the window. The day was cold and clear, the sky so bright a blue that it hurt to look at it. It was an achingly beautiful day. And here we were, shut inside a hospital and peeved with each other.

I stepped over to his bed, took his hand. It was unresponsive in my grasp. “I have to shower and eat, and I have to go see the detective,” I said. “After that, I’ll be back. If I keep moving, I’ll be fine. No one can follow me 24-7. Right?” I hated to sound wheedling, but I did.

“I need to get out of here,” he said.

“Yes, and you will, soon. The doctor said so. Just don’t do anything crazy and fall, okay?”

There was a sketchy knock at the door, and as our heads turned, a short man walked in. He was extraordinary looking-all in black, with platinum spiked hair and piercings in his eyebrow, his nose, and (I knew from the past) his tongue. He was younger than me, somewhere around twenty-one, and he was slim and oddly handsome.

“Hello, Manfred,” Tolliver said. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad to see you.”

Eleven

MANFRED seemed a little hurt that I had protested against his coming with me. “You don’t think I can be helpful?” he asked, his blue eyes looking a shade too forlorn.

“Manfred,” I began, exasperated, “I just don’t know what to do with you.”

“I have some very good ideas,” he said. He waggled his eyebrows.

He was making it funny, but he was serious. I never doubted that at my slightest response, Manfred would be booking us into the nearest hotel as fast as he could whip out his wallet.

The thing was, I’d have to pay for the room, because that wallet was probably empty. I didn’t know how Manfred was getting by. His grandmother, Xylda Bernardo, had been a colorful old fraud, but she’d had the genuine gift. It just didn’t always speak to her when she needed it to, and when she didn’t hear the real voice, she’d make one up. She’d made a poor living at it. She had a flare for the dramatic that had led to some pretty unconvincing overacting.

Manfred was much cannier. And he had the gift, too. I didn’t know the scope and depth of Manfred’s psychic ability, but I had a feeling that as soon as Manfred found his level and honed his gift, he’d be making money. As far as I knew, that hadn’t happened yet.

“First,” I told him, ignoring his innuendo, “I’ve got to go to my hotel and shower and change. Then we’ll go to the other hospital, the one where they took Detective Powers.”

“The Dallas Cowboy? Parker Powers?” Manfred’s face lit up in a wonderful way. “I read an article in Sports Illustrated about him, when he became a cop.”

“I would never have guessed you were a football fan,” I said. Life is a process of reevaluation, isn’t it?

“Are you kidding? I love football. I played in high school.”

I eyed him dubiously.

“Hey, don’t let my size fool you,” Manfred said. “I can run like nobody’s business. And it was a little high school, so they didn’t have much choice,” he added honestly.

“So what position did you play?”

“I was a tight end.” And he said it absolutely straight. Manfred did not joke about football.

“That’s really interesting,” I said, and I meant it. “Manfred, not to change the subject, but why’d you decide to come all this way after I said I could handle it?”

“I got the feeling you were in trouble,” he said. He looked sideways at me, and then straight out the windshield of his car. We’d decided that if I were being followed (an idea that still seemed incredible to me) taking Manfred’s beat-up Camaro might throw my stalker off the trail.

“Really? You saw that?”

“I saw someone shooting at you,” he said. His face was older all of a sudden. “I saw you fall.”

“Did you… You didn’t know for sure I was alive when you came into Tolliver’s room, did you?”

“Well, I’d watched the news, and I didn’t see anything indicating you’d been killed. I did hear that a Garland policeman had been shot. They weren’t releasing his name then. I hoped you were okay. But I wanted to see for myself.”

“So you drove all this way.” I shook my head, marveling.

“I wasn’t that far away,” Manfred said.

There was a little silence, while I waited for him to continue.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Where were you?”

“I was in a motel in Tulsa,” he said. “I had a job there.”

“You’re officially in the business now?”

“Yep. I’ve got a website, the whole nine yards.”

“How does it work?”

“It’s twenty-five dollars for an answer based on one question. Fifty dollars for a consult if they give me their astrological sign and age. And if they want me to travel to them for a private reading, it’s… a lot more.”

“How are you doing?” I’d definitely been wrong about Manfred’s finances.

“Pretty well,” he said, with a slight smile. “Of course, I’m building on Xylda’s reputation. God bless her soul.”

“I know you must miss her.”

“I really, really do. My mother is a very nice woman.” He said that with the air of someone doing his duty. “But my grandmother gave me more love, and I took care of her as much as I could. My mother had to work all the time, and I don’t remember my father, so Xylda was my real… she was my home.”

That was a great way to put it.

“Manfred, I’m so sorry about Xylda. I think of her often.”

“Thanks,” he said, his voice lightening in a conscious attempt to brighten the dark conversation. “She liked you, too. She liked you a lot.”

We were silent for the rest of the ride.

While I showered and changed, Manfred walked down to the place where Parker Powers had been shot the night before. He wanted to see if he could pick up anything there, and he knew I’d be more comfortable if he wasn’t in the room while I was cleaning up. I appreciated both ideas. When he knocked on the door, I was dressed, as made up as my healing face would permit, and braced for our next stop. Manfred set his GPS so we could get to the hospital where Parker Powers was a patient. It was called Christian Memorial. I didn’t understand why he’d been taken there instead of God’s Mercy, where Tolliver was. Tolliver and Parker had both had gunshot wounds, so it couldn’t be the level of trauma the emergency room could handle.

I was impressed with Manfred’s GPS, and I’d been thinking of getting Tolliver one for his birthday, so we talked about that on the way to Christian Memorial. I didn’t want to think about the visit I was about to pay. Fortunately, we had to watch out for everyone else on the road, and that distracted me.

Every city in the world thinks it has the worst traffic. Dallas has grown in such a hurry, and so many people who move to the city haven’t driven in an urban area before, that I think Dallas may be right when it claims its traffic is pretty awful. This congestion extends to the dozens of towns that cluster right around Dallas ’s outskirts. We were maneuvering among those towns now.

When we’d exhausted small talk about the GPS, Manfred asked me about the case we’d been on before we’d come to Dallas. “Fill me in on your last few days” was the way he put it. “You know this shooting is related to something you’ve done recently. I don’t see how the Carolina case can be related.”

I agreed with him. Since Manfred was a colleague, I explained to him about what had happened at Pioneer Rest Cemetery. I wouldn’t have broken my unwritten bond with the Joyces, but I’d come to believe they were probably involved in what was happening. More importantly, I knew Manfred would keep it to himself.